SELF-HYPNOSIS
All hypnosis is Self Hypnosis, The gift of hypnosis always lies within the person not the hypnotist. The hypnotist is merely a trained facilitator in the process there to teach and enhance the natural skill that is already held within the individual in some form.
Self Hypnosis can be used to initiate changes and promote growth in the following areas of life:
CBT
COGNITIVE BEHAVIOURAL THERAPY
CBTis a way of talking about the connections between how we think how we feel and how we behave. It particularly focuses on ideas that are unrealistic.
These often undermine our self esteem, our confidence and make us feel anxious or sad and even sometimes depressed.
When we are distressed tired and anxious our perceptions and interpretations of events can become some what distorted and we tend to lean towards common thinking errors;
LABELING attaching negative labels to an action i.e "I'm a failure!", instead of "I've made a mistake!".
PERSONALIZATION holding oneself responsible for an event totally outside ones control.
FORTUNE TELLING predicting the future in a negative way, without any supporting evidence.
BLACK AND WHITE THINKING all or nothing outlook on life i.e "He doesnt love me, He must hate me!" ..."He succeeds in everything....I never get it right!"
CATASTROPHISING perceiving things are bigger than they really are i.e "Bad things always happen to me!" "Now I will never be able to!" ...
SETTING UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS ..."Should ,""Must," or " Have to!" and the list goes on...
CBT is not just about talking - It incorporates practical goals, oriented strategies and uses emotional and behavioural techniques designed to promote positive cognitive, emotional and behavioural changes into ones persons life.
Enhancements to CBT
:-have led to the mixture of a whole range of techniques, including Mindfulness, Guided imagery, Trancework, Gestalt, NLP,
Psycho-synthesis and more.
All being widely used within the frame work of Integrated Psychotherapy for the treatment of many emotional distress disorders.
However, Integrative Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy (iCBT)
is rapidly becoming the treatment of choice.
iCBT shouldn't be labeled as just another brand of therapy, the therapy itself should evolve with a person from beginning to end.
Rather than prescribing one alleged cure a process of integrative therapy would seem as an appropriate framework, as no single Psychotherapy stands alone when it comes to facilitate a client into an integrated whole, (individualization).
Yet a wide range of various approaches of basic therapies can work together effectively being enhanced, enabling growth of an individual.
An exposure to different models in practice is nessasary for therapists before an integrated approach to therapy can take place.
Many good therapists have answered this calling with some extremely sound results. [1] Hypnosis is a procedure that can be a catalyst to increase treatment efficacy.(Barber,1985;From & Gardner,1979).It has been widely used with other forms of Psychotherapies.
Wide spread agreement within the field, is that Hypnosis is
not a form of therapy on its own, rather,
Hypnosis is a powerful adjunct to talk therapy.
Cognitive hypnotherapists work within the client’s model of the world, so that changes are more likely to be subconsciously accepted and become permanent.
[[1] Irving Kirsch,Clinical Hypnosis and self regulation, p 3.
THE SUBCONSCIOUS
"We are driven subconsciously more than we care to think about!"
[1] An experiment, published in 2005, Dutch psychologists had undergraduates sit in a cubicle and fill out a questionnaire.
Hidden in the room was a bucket of water with a splash of citrus-scented cleaning fluid, giving off a faint odor.
After completing the questionnaire, the young men and women had a snack; a crumbly biscuit provided by laboratory staff members.
The researchers covertly filmed the snack time and found that these students cleared away crumbs three times more often than a comparison group, who had taken the same questionnaire in a room with no cleaning scent.
“That is a very big effect, and they really had no idea they were doing it!" said Henk Arts, a psychologist at Utrecht University and the senior author of the study.
In a another study that appeared in the Science journal in May, a team of English and French neuroscientists performed brain imaging on 18 men and women who were playing a computer game for money.
The players held a hand grip and were told that the tighter they squeezed when an image of money flashed on the screen, the more of the loot they could keep.
As expected, the players squeezed harder when the image of a British pound flashed by than when the image of a penny did — regardless of whether they consciously perceived the pictures, many of which flew by subliminally. [2]But the circuits activated in their brains were similar as well: an area called the ventral pallidum was particularly active whenever the participants responded. “This area is located in what used to be called the reptilian brain, well below the conscious areas of the brain,” said the study’s senior author, Chris Frith, a professor in neuropsychology at University College London who wrote the book “Making Up The Mind: How the Brain Creates our Mental World.”
The results suggest a “bottom-up” decision-making process, in which the ventral pallidum is part of a circuit that first weighs the reward and decides, then interacts with the higher-level, conscious regions later, if at all, Dr. Frith said. This bottom-up order makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.
The subcortical areas of the brain evolved first and would have had to help individuals fight, flee and scavenge well before conscious, distinctly human layers were added later in evolutionary history.
In this sense, Dr. Bargh argues, unconscious goals can be seen as
open-ended, adaptive agents acting on behalf of the broad, genetically encoded aims — automatic survival systems.
[3]An Evolutionist perspective would warn that certain things about us are not going to go away.
The subconscious it said to contain a vast store house of a person’s total experience, the memory of everything that has ever happened to a person is stored in their subconscious mind.
We are perhaps driven to do things unconsciously when our subconscious mind sees fit more than we realise, as the results of the experiments in the above paragraphs have indicated.
COGNITIVE HYPNOTHERAPY
If we are ultimately driven by our subconscious minds through evolution, it would make logical sense to then access and clean up the subconscious as well as the conscious mind, to free both from the illusion of maladaptive thoughts and behaviours as we do now in CBT consciously.
Hypnosis would then hold the key to unlock the subconscious of the many negative schemes, core beliefs and distortions stored and carried around for many years perhaps from childhood.
'Cognitive hypnotherapy becomes a brief and thorough
integrative therapy’.
The use of Cognitive Hypnotherapy offers an ever expanding approach and flexibility in the way treatment is given to an individual or even a group of people in emotional distress.
It even offers a deeper meaning to a person seeking understanding of their own behaviour or development as a person.
[4]Medically it has been stated that up to 80% of all patients visiting the GP with a host of varied symptoms, are suffering from psychosomatic disorders-illnesses which have their origins in the mind.
These range from Anxiety, Depression, Insomnia, through to IBS and lower back pain to name a few.
It is here where the trained therapist in Cognitive Hypnotherapy can and does make a definite contribution by locating the exact cause of the presenting symptoms and correcting the maladaptive thoughts and behaviours, instead of just treating the symptoms.
[5]Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is now in use worldwide, while hypnosis as a technique continues to attract serious interest from the professional community.
Integrating the two, the field of cognitive hypnotherapy uses the natural trance states of clients to unlock unconscious thoughts and memory patterns that can generate and sustain problems.
[6]Dr Alladin has published many chapters and papers on clinical hypnosis. He is interested in the empirical validation of clinical hypnosis and the integration of hypnosis with other forms of psychotherapy.
[7]Cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy has been found to have an effect size of .87 when compared to cognitive behavioural therapy without hypnosis, meaning that the average client in the treatment of cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy was far better off than more than 80% of the clients in the treatment of CBT alone (Kirsch 1993).
As the defined maladaptive cognition's are explored and identified by the therapist, a flexible approach can be incorporated during the session within hypnosis.
[1] Mental Health & Behaviour. The New York Times[2] Making Up The mind; How the brain creates our mental world. Chirs Frith[3] Mixed feelings, David Williamson, What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories Paul E Griffiths.The Australian’s review of Books.[4] Manual 1 ICHP foundation certificate in clinical hypno-psychotherapy,1997 Dr Joseph E. Keaney. Supplementary materials Peter George & associates 2003.[5] Dr Assen Alledin “Cognitive Hypnotherapy An Integrated Approach To The Treatment Of Emotional Disorders”[6] Dr Assen Alledin “Cognitive Hypnotherapy An Integrated Approach To The Treatment Of Emotional Disorders” [7] Cognitive Hypnotherapy E.Thomas Dowed, p 3
MBCT
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy...
Often taught within the frame work of self hypnosis and cognitive therapy is the practice of Mindfulness, this I believe to be the next step in evolution , once the clean up has taken place, the practice of Mindfulness – based cognitive therapy can help and achieve the sustained benevolent results, allowing the person to then move forward in life peacefully.
[1](MBCT)Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy is a method of Therapy which blends features of the two disciplines:
- Cognitive therapy aims to identify and alter Cognitive Distortions (warped or inaccurate thoughts);
- Mindfulness is a meditative practice from Buddhism, which aims to help people identify their thoughts, moment by moment, but without passing judgment on them.
MBCT emphasizes the process of paying attention to thoughts and feelings moment by moment and without judgment.
Changing the client's relationship to the suffering caused by negative thoughts is the key, because there is no possible way to alleviate all suffering.
No therapy or meditation will prevent unpleasant things from happening in our daily lives, but the two practices combined may provide more objectivity from which to view these unpleasant things.
MBCT's main techniques based on the mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR) eight week program, developed by Jon Kabat- Zinn in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy grew largely from Jon Kabat-Zinn's work.
Research shows that MBSR is enormously empowering for patients with Chronic pain, Hypertension, Heart disease, Cancer, and gastrointestinal disorders, as well as for psychological problems such as anxiety and panic.
People often misunderstand the goal of therapy especially mindfulness.
Relaxation and happiness are not the main aim, but rather a freedom from the tendency to get drawn into automatic reactions to thoughts, feelings, and events. (A CONDITIONED RESPONSE)
"We can respond to situations with choice rather than
reacting automatically.”
Research is now showing the effectiveness of mindfulness
in the prevention of relapse.
The UK National Institute For Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE)
has recently endorsed MBCT as an effective treatment
for prevention of relapse.
[2]The core skill of MBCT is to teach the ideas of recognizing thought patterns in order to break away from the false constructs of our mind.(Illusions)
Mindfulness meditation is a useful tool in dealing with many different scenarios.
This approach to meditation focuses our attention back to the present, to what is happening right now in this exact moment.
When one is mindful, the attention is focused on the present so judgment cannot be placed.
MBCT prioritizes learning how to pay attention or concentrate with purpose, in each moment and most importantly, without judgment.[3] [1] Wikipedia MCBT[2] Segal,et al.,2002,p 29[3Fulton,P.,Germer,C.,Siegel,R (2005). Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, New York:Guilford Press.
It looks as if there is little evidence to recommend one type of therapy over another, yet evolution has left us with the survival mechanism,
"-the subconscious mind to contend with-"
Knowing exploration of the unconscious is an important goal of any therapy, which ultimately leads us to insight and awareness, why not use Hypnosis to enhance CBT or any psychotherapy for that matter.
The aim of this Integrative Psychotherapy is to enhance awareness so we are able to respond to things instead of react to them, clinical effectiveness plays a huge role in Therapy.
With the ongoing development of Cognitive Hypnotherapy, the principal goal of the therapist is to facilitate change to an adaptive role in society and within the client themselves, so that they feel whole and complete.
(achieve individualisation)
Ultimately combining Cognitive therapy with Hypnosis increases benefits to clients suffering from a broad range of mental, social, emotional and physical problems.
It becomes iCBT, efficient and effective.
(Integrative Cognitive Behavioural Therapy)
FREEDOM...Peace...Serenity...
